To Be Clear, The Last Of Us Is A Baseball Show

Why a baseball shows up on the windowsill of a girl born six years after the last baseball game.

Spoilers to the first season of The Last Of Us follow. Mid-season spoilers occur almost immediately; season finale spoilers come about halfway down, and I’ll issue a second warning before that.

In the seventh episode of The Last Of Us, Ellie goes to the mall. This episode—a flashback to a few months before the show’s present timeline—is almost entirely an Ellie character-development episode. It’s about her relationship with her best friend and first crush; and about the traumatic event that set the entire rest of the plot into action. Keeping that in mind, there’s a notable moment early on, after Ellie was lectured by her military school’s administrator. He’d just challenged her to take the good path, their conversation wrapped up, and the camera cut to a direct shot of Ellie’s Walkman tape player.

The action shifts to Ellie’s bedroom that night, but without even establishing the new setting. The Walkman shot leads directly into a sequence of similar shots: Close-ups of objects that are important to Ellie. There’s a closeup of her tape collection, of a beloved book of puns, of a comic book, of a drawing of dinosaurs. But the very first of these bedroom close-ups, the first one after the Walkman, is a shot of a scuffed baseball sitting on her windowsill.

No ambiguity there. Incredible intentionality. That’s the detail they wanted, out of ALL the details in the world available to them. So, why?

Obviously, we have to look more broadly at the show to understand why there’s a baseball on Ellie’s windowsill. There are three explanations of decreasing likelihood but increasing thematic significance.

1. First Possibility.

You might remember why we have a flashback here. Ellie, in the show’s present, is holed up in a basement with Joel, who has been badly injured and is bleeding out. She flashes back in order to reclaim the motivation to stay with him, rather than protecting herself but leaving him to die. I know from listening to podcasts that not everybody clearly saw the flash of violence that punctured Joel’s gut, but here it is:

Raiders with bats,

Justin-Turner-With-A-Haircut raider swings bat,

Bat hits tree, breaks in half, and bat stabs Joel,

and Joel removes bat.

And so, simply: The baseball is there to provide continuity between the flashback (Ellie in her pre-TLOU bedroom) and the present-time plot (will Ellie save Joel from bat death?) for which this flashback is doing service.

2. Second Possibility

SEASON FINALE SPOILER BEGINS  HERE

The season finale of this show pulls off a remarkable change of tone, when Joel goes first-person-shooter, kills everybody, and becomes something of a monster to the audience. He also lies to Ellie, and the bleak show became several multiples bleaker. That sequence begins when Joel and Ellie are captured by the Fireflies. And the last scene before Joel and Ellie are captured, before the show goes hopeless is….

…at a baseball field.

A baseball field with giraffes! Joel and Ellie have some fun feeding a giraffe by hand, optimistic music plays in the background, they literally make plans to run a sheep farm together, and then the second they leave this baseball field the ominous music begins to play. In fact…

Ah, no, the closed captions don’t say “ominous music begins to play.” But there’s no question what’s happening as the scene shifts away from the overgrown baseball field. The show/game’s creators are basically setting up the baseball field as an idyllic, peaceful, anachronistic setting. The baseball on Ellie’s windowsill foreshadows the moment she and Joel will leave it.

3. Third Possibility.

A bunch of the close-ups in the Ellie’s Favorite Things sequence end up coming into play in the mall. Ellie and Riley dance to the Etta James tape. Ellie excitedly asks whether Riley is taking her to see dinosaurs. The Walkman is how the zombie hears/finds them. And in the same bedroom scene, a Mortal Kombat poster on Ellie’s wall prepares us for her excitement at seeing Mortal Kombat in a working arcade. The knife we see by her bedside is how she stabs the zombie to redeath. The book of puns sets us up for Riley’s extremely touching gift to Ellie: A second book of puns.

Which makes us think the baseball probably has relevance in that mall. Maybe not. The comic book that Ellie is reading doesn’t come up in the same episode, but it’s still significant as a callback to episode 5, with Sam, in Kansas City. So there are explanations for the baseball that relate to the series as a whole but not the episode, and maybe that’s all it is.

But maybe—maybe—this might be a stretch but I like it—the baseball is relevant to the episode. The takeaway from the episode, what Ellie learns and takes with her back into the present, comes when she and Riley are bitten by the zombie and face absolutely zero percent playoff odds. And Riley says they could just shoot themselves before turning into zombies themselves, or they can keep on going.  

Ellie: What are you talking about? It’s over!
Riley: It will be, but it’s not yet.

Now, look, if you were a good and self-respecting screenwriter, would you dare put the words “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over” in a character’s mouth? No chance. But that’s the sentiment that Riley is getting across here. It’s all of a lineage with Yogi Berra’s famous quote. So maybe that’s what the baseball is about: It’s setting up a conclusion to the episode’s story where a character insists, in her own words, that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. That’s what saves Ellie, ultimately. That’s what saves Joel, ultimately. Baseball show.